Sarah Dessen Quotes

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

You know what the hardest thing is? What nobody wants to understand -- is me. People want their memories of me to be my memories of me. But you know what? They're not.

Identity is invariably false to facts.

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

It's hard for me to describe my own style because I'm me.

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

If the image one holds of one's self contains elements that don't square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe.

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

When we use memories, we are creators. But when our memories use us, we become victims.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

But I must go on," said the Lady Amalthea, "for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me know. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws me nearer, though I am awake—